Seven Bridges

by LJ Ross

  He slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  One of the local constables spotted him and started to say something but Ryan didn’t hear it. He ducked beneath the barrier and simply stared at the destruction that had been wrought, unlike anything he’d dealt with before.

  It was like a war zone.

  Dust and debris floated on the morning breeze like cherry blossom before falling to the earth to join the mound of detritus and human flesh that lay scattered across the narrow walkway of the bridge. Even standing a few dozen feet away from the entrance, Ryan could see the twisted remains of bodies lying broken and burned amongst what was left of their possessions; a handbag, a shoe and, in one case, a child’s school bag.

  Tears flooded his eyes and Ryan took several deep breaths, ordering himself to remain detached.

  “…sir?”

  He looked around at the first responder hovering beside him, looking to him for instructions.

  “Are there any survivors?” Ryan asked.

  “Just two,” the constable replied, pointing towards a couple of ambulances parked further along the road. “The paramedics are helping them now. It wasn’t safe for them to go onto the bridge to check the others, so we don’t know for sure but, judging by the look of them, there’s nothing… I don’t know how many people were killed, sir, I couldn’t—I couldn’t tell…”

  The man faltered, visibly struggling with what he’d seen, and Ryan put a hand on his arm.

  “Take a breath,” he advised. “Focus on action, for now. I need you to push this cordon right back and close the road in both directions, for starters.”

  The man nodded vigorously and hurried off to make a start.

  Ryan looked across the faces of the crowd, sensing their fear and mistrust, and wondered if a murderer was amongst them. He wondered if The Alchemist had come down to get a front row seat and watch as they shattered lives.

  And then he spotted Phillips and MacKenzie making their way towards him.

  “We got here as quickly as we could,” MacKenzie said, ducking beneath the barrier to join him. “What’s the status?”

  “I’m waiting for EOD to arrive so we can access what’s left of the bridge,” Ryan said. “On the face of it, there are no survivors still on the bridge. You can see that at a glance.”

  She looked past him towards the bridge and swallowed.

  “What did we miss?” she whispered.

  Before he could answer, Ryan spotted the EOD Unit arriving, fully kitted out in protective gear. Nobel had called in Sergeant Bannerman and Corporal Wilson, the other members of his unit having been dispatched to help secure the southern side of the bridge.

  As Nobel approached, Ryan steered him to one side.

  “I thought these bridges had been thoroughly checked,” he began, working hard to reign in his anger. “You personally checked that bridge yesterday afternoon and declared it safe, then this morning there’s a massacre—”

  Nobel stepped forward to push his face into Ryan’s and, although the man was a few inches shorter, Ryan frowned at the level of aggression swimming so close to the surface.

  “Firstly, you can address me as Captain from now on—”

  “Careful,” Ryan warned, in a low tone. “Watch yourself, Nobel. You’re not at the barracks, now.”

  “I’m not answerable to you—”

  “Wrong,” Ryan cut across him. “As long as I’m the Senior Investigating Officer in charge and there’s a memorandum of agreement between the army and civilian law enforcement, you are answerable to me. And I’m asking you to provide an explanation for how this was missed.”

  Nobel held up a hand and paced away for a moment, seeming to bring himself under control, and Ryan realised suddenly that the man looked shaken.

  He moderated his tone, to take account of it.

  “Look, Gary. Mistakes can be made but I need to know what happened, here. People have died.”

  Nobel ran his hands through his hair and turned back with over-bright eyes.

  “I don’t know how it happened, okay? Is that what you want to hear? I don’t bloody know how the hell this could have happened. I checked the bridge myself with one of the lads and we combed every inch of it. The local police stayed on through the night to make sure nobody tried to access the bridge between then and now, so I haven’t got a clue how this could have happened.”

  “You must have missed it,” Ryan thought aloud.

  “I’m telling you, I checked every inch of the bridge,” Nobel reiterated. “Look, Ryan. I have a wife and kids myself. If I thought we’d dropped the ball on this, I’d tell you, believe me.”

  Ryan searched his face and gave a brief nod.

  “Then somebody slipped beneath the radar and accessed the bridge after it was checked, yesterday afternoon. Who checked it with you?”

  “I had Kev with me,” Nobel said, gesturing towards his corporal who was talking to Phillips. “He knows his stuff, Ryan. We all do.”

  “Alright, Gary. I need you to make the area safe so that we can access it and make a start identifying the victims.”

  Nobel looked across at the bridge.

  “I’ve seen worse when I’ve been on tour,” he said, bleakly. “You’re taught to expect that, to prepare for it, because you’re on active duty. Nobody goes to Afghanistan and thinks they’ll come home without having seen some shit. But at home?” He shook his head. “Up until now, we’ve always disposed of any threat before anybody was hurt. We got complacent,” he said, with a catch to his voice.

  Ryan put a hand briefly on his shoulder, then moved off to deal with the fall-out.

  CHAPTER 26

  While the EOD Unit went to work on the bridge, Ryan went over to speak to the two survivors who were being treated for minor cuts and bruises inside an ambulance before being transferred to hospital.

  “Can I have a minute?” he asked the senior paramedic.

  “I need to get them over to the RVI,” she said, referring to the closest hospital. “They have shrapnel injuries. You can speak to them later.”

  “I only need a minute,” he said.

  “That’s all you’ve got.”

  Ryan thanked her and followed the ramp onto the back of the ambulance, where he found a woman and her young daughter being tended to by another paramedic. Despite the gash on the woman’s face and the cuts on the little girl’s arms and legs, his heart soared to see them.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m DCI Ryan, from the Criminal Investigation Department.”

  The woman’s eyes flickered briefly over the tall man with the jet-black hair, then fell away again as she bore down against the pain at her temple. The little girl stared at him with wide green eyes, and then pointed to her leg.

  “I’ve got a Frozen plaster on my leg,” she told him, tapping the large bandage covering her calf that was emblazoned with the cartoon likeness of two princesses from the Disney movie.

  “I can see that,” he said, coming a little further into the ambulance. “You’re very brave. What’s your name?”

  “Amelia,” she told him, shyly. He did, after all, resemble so many of the cartoon princes she’d seen in her favourite films.

  “Hi Amelia,” he said. “I’m a policeman. Do you mind if I ask you and your mum some questions about what happened?”

  She looked across at her mother’s face, which was still drawn with shock.

  “I think my mummy’s poorly,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” her mother said, in a voice barely above a whisper.

  “Thank you,” Ryan said, putting his hand on hers for a second. “Is there anyone I can contact for you?”

  “Her husband’s on his way to the hospital,” the paramedic put in. “She’s not critical but he’s meeting us there, so I don’t want to wait too long.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “I understand, and I won’t keep you. I only want to ask one thing, for now. Did you see anyone acting strangely as you were crossing the brid
ge? Anyone who seemed out of sorts?”

  The mother, whose name turned out to be Carole, closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “There were just a few other people walking over the bridge, mostly from the Gateshead side towards Newcastle. There couldn’t have been more than four or five people, including us.”

  “Alright,” he said. “Do you remember if any of them were wearing a backpack, or carrying a large bag of any kind?”

  “I lost my bag,” Amelia complained, and Ryan thought of the little school satchel he’d seen lying amongst the debris. He’d thought the child it belonged to might be counted amongst the dead, so to find her sitting there chatting to him was an overwhelming relief.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said softly. “Maybe you’ll get a new one. Do you remember seeing anyone else carrying a satchel or a big bag?”

  The girl screwed up her face as she tried to remember, then shook her head.

  “No, just normal bags like my mummy’s.”

  “Okay. Do you remember seeing anybody running away from the bridge?”

  But the little girl had lost interest and her mother just shook her head.

  “It was still dark, you see, and I was in a hurry. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  Ryan thanked them both and wished them well, promising to return to the hospital to check up on them. He was making a mental note to purchase a new school bag for the little girl when her mother called out to him.

  “Do you know if the woman in the red coat survived?”

  Ryan frowned, thinking of the remains he had seen on the bridge.

  “Was she a friend of yours?”

  “No, no. I don’t even know her name, but I see her almost every morning around the same time because we both use the bridge each day to get to the north side.”

  “And she was there today?”

  “Yes, I saw her sipping a coffee outside the Baltic,” she said. “She’s always got a coffee in her hand, too. We passed her, so I was wondering if she was on the bridge behind us as we were reaching the north side.”

  “I don’t know,” Ryan said, honestly. “But I’ll try to find out.”

  * * *

  By the time Ryan finished speaking to Amelia and her mother, the EOD Unit had dispatched a robotic device to check over the remains of what had been the Millennium Bridge and pronounced it safe to cross. Ryan decided against making any snide remarks about that and joined Faulkner, their senior CSI, and Captain Noble in a walk-through of what was now a major crime scene in addition to being a national incident.

  They wore protective polypropylene suits over padded vests and helmets and when they took their first steps beyond the police barrier they could only be grateful that the weather was not warm. Their rubber boots skidded against the slippery metal floor of the bridge, which was coated in a layer of melting ice and rubble and, through the dust, they could see the sharp ends of the nails and ball bearings that had been packed into the explosive device.

  “The bomb was designed to cause serious damage, this time,” Nobel said, as evenly as he could. “Not only was the blast zone much larger but you’ve got all this crap packed inside it.”

  He scuffed the toe of his boot against the nails coating the floor.

  “Where was it hidden?” Faulkner asked.

  “We’re fairly certain it was inside that rubbish bin in the middle of the bridge,” he said, pointing a gloved hand towards a burnt-out shell. “We emptied it yesterday and checked it inside and out, so something had to have been planted sometime after four o’clock, yesterday afternoon.”

  “Watch where you step,” Ryan murmured, and all three men fell silent as they entered the main blast site. They stopped to allow Faulkner to photograph each section from different angles, moving carefully so as not to disturb too much or to stand on anything that looked as though it had once belonged to a person.

  Ryan’s system wanted to revolt, to reject the sight of torn flesh carpeting the floor beneath his feet but he continued, boxing away his feelings, for there was work to be done here, and a killer to be found.

  He’d counted three separate bodies, so far.

  “Two male, one female,” he murmured, and Faulkner nodded, stooping down to capture a close-up of one of the victim’s faces to be used for identification.

  “There were eyewitness reports of at least one person falling into the water,” Ryan said, pausing again to allow Faulkner to photograph the third body of a man whose face was covered in nails. “The woman who survived—Carole—tells me there may be another woman in a red coat. I haven’t seen anyone matching that description, so far. Have you?”

  Nobel said nothing, but made as if to hurry ahead.

  “Wow! Gary, we take each section at a time,” Faulkner reminded him, with a measure of irritation. The man was surely used to their procedure, by now.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I thought I’d go ahead and check to see if we’d missed anyone.”

  “The divers are suited up,” Ryan said, and bobbed his head towards a boat moored off the south side of the river holding a team of five or six police divers from the Marine Unit. “They’ll start searching to see if there’s anyone to find.”

  “I don’t envy them going down there at this time of year,” Faulkner said.

  “They’re used to it,” Ryan murmured, and raised a hand to acknowledge the sergeant in charge of the unit, who he had worked with several times before.

  “Careful,” Nobel warned them, as they neared the epicentre of the blast. “The bridge is holding but it’s much smaller than the others and there are no guarantees it won’t buckle. The bomb took a chunk out of the centre.”

  Ryan and Faulkner stepped to one side as they neared the centre of the bridge, swaying a bit in the strong wind that blew in from the seaward side and swirled up small clouds of dust. They could see a jagged hole where the bin once stood and, if they edged closer, they could see rippling water beneath.

  “Why this bridge?” Faulkner asked. “There was nothing to be gained from it.”

  Ryan disagreed.

  “The explosion went up this morning at eight-oh-nine. It’s an odd time to pick, if the bomber had set a timer. That has to throw up the possibility of a remote-controlled device. What do you say, Nobel?”

  “I agree,” he said. “We’ve taken what was left of the device and we’ll do our best to reconstruct a diagram, with Faulkner’s help, but it makes logical sense that it would be manually detonated.”

  Ryan had already asked Phillips to speak to the security staff at the courthouse, to see if their CCTV cameras had picked up anything from the bridge that morning, or last night, and would do the same with all the local businesses that might have footage of what happened.

  He turned to Noble and Faulkner but, just as he opened his mouth to speak, he felt a buzzing in his jacket pocket and pulled out his phone to check the caller ID.

  “Yates?” he said, stepping away from the others to find a more secluded spot.

  “I’ve just had a call from Bev at The Enquirer,” Melanie said. “She was absolutely distraught, and it took a while to calm her down enough to understand what she was talking about. They’ve just received another e-mail from The Alchemist. I’m sending it through to you now.”

  “Thanks,” Ryan ended the call, and then waited for what felt like the longest five seconds of his life until the e-mail pinged into his inbox. His eyes narrowed at the content:

  You were warned not to interfere with the website.

  Did you think I wouldn’t notice that you rigged the bitcoin counter?

  The Millennium Bridge is the price you must pay.

  Ryan read, then re-read the e-mail before placing an urgent call to Chief Constable Morrison followed by his contact at GCHQ. To his knowledge, nobody had tampered with the website or the bitcoin counter; nobody had dared. But, if some trumped-up Whitehall bigwig had gone over his head and fiddled with it, they’d have him to answer to.

  CHAPTER
27

  By one o’clock, there were four confirmed victims of the Millennium Bridge Attack, as it had come to be known in the press. All seven bridges connecting Gateshead and Newcastle via the city centre remained closed while the threat was ongoing and the transport network ground to a halt once again, forcing people to revert to an earlier time when cars and trains had not been available. They walked or cycled through the streets, bundled into woollen coats and scarves as the temperature remained steadily below zero.

  There was an uncomfortable silence in the two cities as people waited, trapped in a kind of purgatory where they were unable to continue with their ordinary lives and yet could do nothing to help themselves. As the situation dragged on, businesses closed their doors and the police were stretched to their limits as complaints of theft and looting began to trickle in and they were called upon to keep the peace.

  Phillips ruminated on the subject as they drove the short distance from the Quayside to the mortuary.

  “Now, just hear me out,” he began, and Ryan rolled his eyes. “If I were the kind of low-life degenerate who decided to go looting the minute my city was in trouble, why the bloody hell would I go and nick off with a pair of Nike high-tops?”

  “Maybe it was the first thing they saw.”

  Phillips carried on.

  “All I’m sayin’ is, if you woke up and thought, ‘whey aye, I’ll gan’ doon the toon and nick a few bob’s worth of stuff while nobody’s lookin’,’ why wouldn’t you choose a jewellery shop? Or one of the fancy department stores? Why the chuff would anybody go and steal a pair of trainers?”

  “Maybe they needed shoes,” Ryan suggested.

  “Aye, but if you needed to steal a pair of shoes you could do that any time,” Phillips argued. “This here is prime time for thieves, at the moment. It’s an opportunity to have their pick o’ the lot and they’re still goin’ for neon green high-tops. Some people have got no idea.”

  Ryan turned into the hospital car park and brought the car to a stop inside one of the bays before turning to his sergeant.